WoW

We all already have crazy Shadowlands theories, right?

In the past, Blizzard has been slow to announce just how it will handle digital bonuses for the people who collect the physical Collector's Editions — but this year Blizzard let us know how it will handle Shadowlands' many editions in advance, which is a pleasant surprise. During Legion, people who bought the Collector's Edition of the game also had to order a digital copy to get pre-order bonuses, they could gift a copy of the digital game to friends when their Collector's Edition arrived.

Blizzard games are often distinct from one another -- you're not going to confuse Hearthstone with StarCraft, for example -- but they are not conceived and executed in vacuum, and there is influence between each.

Shadowlands is bringing back the class fantasy feeling of Legion, so much that they're cheekily calling it "The Unpruning" — undoing the "surgical pruning" that has been happening since Warlords of Draenor.

Out of all the announcements about World of Warcraft at BlizzCon 2019, two things spoken by Ion Hazzikostas stood out to me over anything else: "unpruning" and "player agency." I'm hopeful that this is a sea change in the design philosophy for WoW.

I ask this sight unseen because I actually haven't seen it yet.

Happy 15th anniversary, World of Warcraft!

Activision Blizzard's latest earnings call posited good news for World of Warcraft: the third quarter of the year saw the largest quarterly subscription increase in the franchise's history.

I got to play Shadowlands at BlizzCon 2019, and I have opinions.